NooBaa wraps AWS S3 wool around Microsoft Azure Blob storage

Upstart lets apps use on and off-prem storage in two shakes of a lamb's tail

Microsoft has partnered with object storage software startup NooBaa, which has developed an Amazon S3-compatible front-end to Azure.

NooBaa produces object storage software that can put to work under-utilized compute cores and storage capacity on x86 servers and desktops around a customer's IT equipment estate, and make it all accessible as an S3-like cloud service.

The upstart has now announced native integration with Microsoft's Azure Blob Storage, so it can act as a bridge between on- and off-premises storage with Redmond's cloud. Its software is available in Microsoft's marketplace, and NooBaa has joined Microsoft's Accelerator program, giving it access to Microsoft customers, mentoring, funding and facilities.

Navot Volk, managing director of Microsoft Accelerator, had a canned quote about hybrid on-premises/public cloud storage: "This blended model lets you stop worrying about where your apps are, and focus more on how to leverage the right resources for the right value ... hybrid is not a temporary state but the new normal."

The Enterprise Edition of NooBaa's software will ship in February next year. Erasure coding is on the near-term road map. It's also developing function-as-a-Service with Lambda-like functions. It might even add a database.

NooBaa was founded by ex-Exanet and former Dell Fluid File System people in Israel in 2013; it received seed round funding of $2m in 2014 and another $2 million in bridge funding in early 2015.

And the origin of the name NooBaa? The NooBians wanted Noob.com, named after the slang term for newbie. GoDaddy said the domain name was already taken and sold them NooBaa.com instead for under $4/year. ®